Colonial American Travel Narratives: Class and Bias in the New World
This paper examines four travel narratives collected in Colonial American Travel Narratives — Mary Rowlandson's captivity account, Sarah Kemble Knight's journal, William Byrd II's secret history of the Virginia/North Carolina boundary survey, and Alexander Hamilton's itinerarium — as windows into early colonial life and social attitudes. The analysis argues that despite the promise of a new world open to social mobility, each author reproduced the class hierarchies, racial prejudices, and cultural biases of Europe. Through close reading of selected passages, the paper traces how disdain for lower-class colonists, enslaved people, and Native Americans permeates these otherwise informative travel accounts, and how that bias illuminates the origins of American class stratification.
- Introduction: The New World Through Biased Eyes: Four narratives reveal European class bias transplanted to America
- Mary Rowlandson and the Captivity Narrative: Puritan captive's journey and complex view of Native Americans
- Sarah Kemble Knight's Class-Conscious Journal: Boston traveler's disdain for lower classes and racial minorities
- William Byrd II and the Secret History of the Dividing Line: Virginia aristocrat stereotypes Carolinians and Native Americans
- Alexander Hamilton's Intellectual Elitism: Physician-traveler's elitist social ambitions and Tuesday Club
- Conclusion: Old World Prejudices in the New World: Colonial biases planted roots of American class stratification
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses direct quotation from each primary source to ground every analytical claim, letting the authors' own words illustrate the bias being described.
- Maintains a consistent comparative thread — the persistence of European class hierarchy in the New World — across four very different narrative types (captivity account, travel diary, boundary survey, medical itinerarium).
- Balances fair summary of each text's merits with honest critique of its social prejudices, avoiding a purely negative reading.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic comparative analysis across primary texts. Rather than treating each narrative in isolation, it extracts a unifying argument — the transplantation of Old World class and racial bias into colonial America — and uses each successive author as additional evidence. Embedded block quotations are followed by brief analytical commentary that ties the passage back to the central thesis, a foundational skill in literary and historical essay writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis-forward introduction that names all four sources and previews the argument. It then devotes a focused section to each narrative in the order they appear in the anthology, combining plot summary with textual analysis. A final synthesis section connects the four authors' shared biases to the broader historical development of American class stratification, closing the argumentative loop opened in the introduction.
Introduction: The New World Through Biased Eyes
What was the New World like for its early European inhabitants? The book Colonial American Travel Narratives offers four interesting and insightful travel narratives that describe the New World and its varied inhabitants through the eyes — and thus the personal outlook — of their authors. In doing so, the narratives reveal as much about the individuals who settled this new land as about the land itself. According to these accounts, life in America was not, at least on an economic level, dramatically different from life in Europe. Although the continent offered many settlers the opportunity to rise above their previous socio-economic position, the social class system arrived with the colonists and proved just as entrenched as it had been in Europe. This is evident in the authors' comments, which are often negative and demeaning toward lower-class colonists, Black people, and Native Americans.
Mary Rowlandson and the Captivity Narrative
The first narrative is very different from the other three in the collection. Titled "A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," it follows Mary White Rowlandson, originally from Somerset, England, who moved to Massachusetts in 1638 and married a church reverend. In 1676, however, she and her children — aged 14, 10, and 6 — were abducted by warring Native Americans. While a prisoner, Rowlandson traveled approximately 150 miles, from Lancaster to Menamaset, then north to Northfield and across the Connecticut River to meet with King Philip/Metacomet, sachem of the Wampanoags. She then traveled into southwestern New Hampshire, south to Menamaset, and north to Mount Wachusett. Her youngest daughter died of wounds sustained during the kidnapping, and her other two children were taken from her.
Three months after her capture, Rowlandson was ransomed for twenty pounds and returned to Princeton, Massachusetts, where she was reunited with her two surviving children. Her story, imbued with religious fervor, offered readers inspiration on how to endure adversity:
"The next day was the Sabbath: I then remembered how careless I had been of God's holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God's sight; which lay so close upon my spirit, that it was easie for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of my life, and cast me out of his presence for ever. Yet the Lord still shewed mercy to me …" (14)
Rowlandson's narrative was also notable for its portrayal of her captors as individuals who suffered and faced difficult decisions. She acknowledged their humanity and showed some sympathy toward their treatment of captives: "If I went to their wigwam at any time, they would always give me something; and yet they were strangers that I never saw before" (37). One captor even shared a Bible with her. Nevertheless, her narration also reflected a Calvinist religious philosophy, casting the Native Americans as instruments of God sent to "be a scourge to the whole Land."
Sarah Kemble Knight's Class-Conscious Journal
"The Journal of Madam Knight" is a travel diary kept by Sarah Kemble Knight during a journey from Boston to New York in 1704–1705. Where Rowlandson's narrative stressed seventeenth-century Puritanism, spirituality, and belief in the afterlife, Knight's secular journal was firmly rooted in the here and now. Knight emphasized that whatever good she accomplished in this world would be rewarded in this world — not the next.
Although she felt anxious about Native Americans while traveling, Knight was more troubled by the prospect of associating with people she regarded as beneath her in class and station. She described such encounters with open derision:
"Wednesday, October 4. But our Hostes, being a pretty full mouth'd old creature, entertain'd our fellow travailer, the french Dofter with Inumerable complaints of her bodily infirmities; and whisperd to him so lou'd, that all the House had as full a hearing as hee: which was very divirting to the company, (of which there was a great many,) as one might see by their sneering."
Knight did nothing to hide her disdain for many of the people she encountered, nor for Native Americans and enslaved Black people. All of her experiences were filtered through her acute awareness of her own social and economic position. She was openly mocking about the ignorance and poor taste of rustic country people, while lavishly praising "the wonderful civility" shown to her in the city by members of the upper class. She frequently struggled to find appropriate lodging, being forced to stay at roadside inns alongside lower-class patrons whom she regarded as habitually drunk and poorly behaved. She described fearing for her safety and rest as the only woman among several intoxicated men. Knight condoned slavery and was appalled that some farmers allowed their enslaved workers to "sit at table and eat with them." Throughout her journal, she referred to Native Americans in dehumanizing terms, comparing them to animals. Ironically, this schoolteacher was later fined for selling liquor to Native Americans — charges she denied, blaming her servant instead.
Conclusion: Old World Prejudices in the New World
By reading these narratives, it is not difficult to trace how the class system — so deeply embedded in the present American economic order — arrived and took root in this country. The settlers hoped to build a world fundamentally different from the one they had left. Yet as this collection makes plain, they carried the Old World with them into the New. Despite the genuine insights each author offers into colonial life, their personal and social-class biases follow them across the Atlantic, unchanged. America promised a land where anyone could advance through hard work and individual will, but it was also a land that inherited, and perpetuated, the same prejudices that had characterized European colonialism elsewhere.
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